At the pool yesterday, I was wearing my usual swimwear, which covers more square (or should I say round?) footage than most people's swimwear. That's how I met Stella. She paddled right over and touched my arm and asked, "Why are you wearing clothes in the pool?" I said, "This is my swimsuit. Do you like it?" She looked at me skeptically and said, "Uh huh. What's your name?"
"Janel. What's yours?"
"Stella."
I couldn't help but do my Marlon Brando "Steeellllaaaaa!" impression. I'm sure she didn't get it, but she laughed. I asked her how old she was.
"Four. How old are you?"
"41."
Without hesitation, Stella announced proudly, "I can count to 41!" and proceeded to start doing just that. Somewhere around 27, her mother intervened and rescued me. I went outside and got in the hot tub with Mike and watched Noah playing with his new friend Zi. Sarah had introduced us to Zi and his family by making friends with his Dad in the hot tub. I had been inside and looked out to check on Sarah and found her chatting happily with a guy with shaggy purple hair, lots of tattoos and scars, and wearing black nail polish. I joined them, and ended up meeting the whole family. They were really nice.
So after about 45 minutes, I went back inside, and Stella greeted me like I was a rock star. She yelled from the pool, "Hi, Janel!" and looked absolutely thrilled to see me. She wanted to play hide and seek in the pool. There weren't many (any) hiding places, so that got old pretty quick.
I picked up a weird pinecone-ish kind of thing that fell off a tree by the hot tub, because I wanted to bring it back with me to try to identify the tree. I set it down with my stuff in the locker room, and a little girl came along and picked it up. Her mom got out of the shower and said, "What is that? Is it yours?" The girl nodded and gripped it firmly. The mom said, "Ok, let's go" and off they went. I wonder what kind of tree that was? Maybe I'll try to identify it today.
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